Environmentalists fuel alcoholism

Submitted by Sean Lloyd

Working in the eco-industry, I constantly stress about little things environment wise. Are my friends recycling? Are they using organic body-care products? Are their products local, and not imported? I wonder if that salad is organic?

Do they even care?

All these questions were piling up in my head late last year and making me go a little bit crazy to be honest. It’s a bit embarrassing to finish off your latest Joost joke at a boys’ braai then interrogate your host as to whether he will recycle the beer bottle you’ve just emptied. It’s not part of the “bro-code” to do this.

So I just left it. This eco-guilt built up for many months last year until finally I couldn’t take it any more and went on one of the biggest benders of my life.

Jagermeister, Red Bull, vodka and Coke is what it should have read. Instead my brain saw it as this:

Glass, tin, glass, tin.

Good grief!

As the booze flowed, emotions ran high and I started suffering from booze-induced emotional eco-guilt. With every beer down it was a case of “I wonder if it’s getting recycled?” instead of “Look at that hottie across the bar”, I started to look around and noticed that there were loads of drunk people around me and then it hit me.

Everyone suffers from eco-guilt. There is no way that you can’t suffer from it. If you drive a car and watch TV, you know that you are killing the planet. And so you start to drink. These people in nightclubs simply escape their homes and pile into clubs to get away from TVs that constantly advertise the latest energy-saving devices.

Drinking leads to major hunger so you go get a beef burger. You know that beef uses large amounts of energy to make. You feel guiltier. You smoke a joint to calm down. You get the munchies.

Eat another burger. Suffer more guilt. You start drinking to try and forget the guilt. You start crying as the barman throws your bottles and tins into a regular bin. You try drink through this and forget it, but it’s a perpetual cycle of guilt. It’s a cycle of “I drink because I feel guilty” and “I feel guilty because I drink”. It’s almost certainly a direct cause of the continuing rise in alcoholism the world over.

Drinking is there to allow us to escape this eco-guilt that has been brought down upon us by world leaders and the world press. If you’re reading this and not recycling the beer bottle you’re drinking from, you’re going to eco-hell. So in that case, you might as well hit me up with a double Jameson. And a Red Bull on the side

And throw the bottle and the tin into the ocean. I might as well have a real reason to be so hammered and feel so guilty at the same time.

Lloyd works for EcoSouth Travel (http://www.ecosouth.co.za) and also runs a Cape Town lifestyle blog (http://www.slxs.co.za)